In the past year, artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots have attained a steady pace of growth. Bot creation is anticipated to take the limelight by 2021, but the journey to the spotlight will start from 2018 onwards. On the other hand, AI has been growing by leaps and bounds.

Presently, 15% of the businesses use AI. This number is forecasted to reach 31% in the present year. What’s more interesting is that 72% of the businesses consider AI integration in their digital marketing strategies and view it as a “business advantage.” Chatbots are consolidated with AI to create smart Talkbots.

What are chatbots?

The Techopedia defines these bots as,

“A chatbot is an artificial intelligence (AI) program that simulates interactive human conversation by using key pre-calculated user phrases and auditory or text-based signals.”

Such a bot formulates a response only after comprehending user intent. It sends out a response that is shaped by the organizational data and business rules. Interest in these smart entities has hiked up as per the revelations of Google Trends shown below:

These artificial conversational bots or chatbot are presumed to redefine the way organizations do business as they will help excel customer services. Business pros such as Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, and Google are already tapping into the potential of smart bots. Medium and small enterprises are expected to follow suit.

Here is how you can use AI-infused chatbots for furthering your business in 2018:

1. Use voice bot assistants

You can use AI and chatbots as intelligent voice bots for engaging with customers. These bots can help pinpoint customer problems and find adequate solutions to those problems. A leaf can be taken from the books of giants like Amazon, Google, and Apple that employ voice bots assistants for customers.

Industry experts expect to see an ascend in the conversation-based interactions in the current year. Furthermore, the success of voice bot projects is encouraging the development of more efficient voice bots. Therefore, you can enhance your brand’s customer support through voice assistant bots.

2. Embrace as virtual assistants

You can pair together smart bots and voice recognition technologies and use them as virtual assistants. The use of such smart speakers has tremendously increased in the previous year. Consumer products such as these have grown by three times in sales in the US alone.

You can harness the potential of these bot VAs for lending you a hand in managing your business matters, or you can use such devices for enhancing customer services. These will multiply engagement opportunities.

3. Use to enhance conversion

You can govern chatbot conversations with your customers to culminate in a particular goal. The interaction can culminate in a call to action once a client is ready to proceed. Add such a call to action button to guide the user to a determined target.

With these call to action buttons, you can drive your customer to any page on your business website. You can also directly lead a customer to the checkout page, or the bot can encourage the user to share his experience socially. In such a manner, the smart bot serves as a valuable tool for conversion. You wouldn’t have to dedicate any manual sales assistance for this.

4. Employ for visual and voice search for customers

Smartphone VAs like Siri have ignited the trend of machine vision and voice recognition tech. It is estimated that 50% of all the searches by 2020 will be voice-based. On top of that, 30% of the research will be conducted without a screen in 2020.

Over and above that, machine vision is also geared to make some waves in the current year. A case in point is ASOS’s initiative that it took last year. It allows users to click a picture of a clothing item on the spot. Users can then search a similar clothing piece on the store’s clothing database.

Data confirms that ASOS’s visual search has amped up order placement by 9%. Also, visual searchers viewed 48% more items than customers who didn’t avail the option. Hence, you can use AI and chatbots to this end and diversify your customer’s search capabilities.

5. Use to increase customer engagement

Chatbots snowball customer engagement for your business. Research indicates that companies that interact with their customers on social networks can balloon customers spending by 20%-40%. Enhanced customer engagement, in turn, leads to customer loyalty. For instance, this bot in the example below enhances the interaction by adding a pinch of humor.

In contrast with customer service agents, talkbots extract more info from customers while providing bits of required guidance accurately. In doing so, they don’t bore away the customers with irrelevant information, therefore, keeping them active on the platform for longer.

6. Personalize customer interactions with AI

Numerous applications promote personalized experiences to garner more customer data. Years of customer data collection has enabled businesses to sell customized messages, services, and promotion deals to their clients. Talk bots and AI are helpful at this end too.

Chatbots help gather more customer data via enhanced engagements with them. On the other hand, AI intelligently monitors and remembers customers’ choices. It analyzes such data to make product or service recommendations to customers as per their preferences. A case in point is Netflix that makes smart recommendations to its viewers. Thus, smart chatbots that you employ for this purpose help improve the user experience and gain more customer insight.

7. Enhance customer support

Increased customer support corresponds with good business progress. You can employ AI-powered chatbots to polish this area in three ways. Firstly, these provide extensive assistance to the customers. A survey confirms that 83% of online shoppers require assistance while selecting items. They may have queries related to registration, checkout, delivery, payment, etc. In all the cases, chatbots can provide real-time assistance.

Secondly, these provide round the clock customer support. 24/7 customer service leaves a positive impression on the clients. You can solve this issue via bots that can answer repetitive questions promptly. In the case of a complicated query, bots can forward the problem to human customer services. In this way, your team of customer services can save time and use it for solving critical issues.

Thirdly, you can utilize artificial conversational entities for engaging in active customer interaction. Most of your customer services team tends to be occupied with passive customer interaction. This means that they respond only when contacted by customers. However, bots can initiate active communication. This will polish your business’s perception in the long haul.

In a nutshell:

You can use chatbots and AI to your advantage in numerous ways. You can embrace them as virtual assistants, voice and visual search aids, and as a means to increase customer support. They help encourage personalized customer engagement for your clients too.

Smart bots provide greater customer insights, and there are fewer chances of error. The setup helps lessen service time by as much as five times and the operating costs by roughly 66%. You can embed AI bots in your business website or develop a smart app to assist customers.